Dear Diary,

Sorry I’ve been remiss in writing these past few days. As you may have heard, peace – or something we hope is close to it – has broken out in south Lebanon. But that doesn’t mean the lights are back on yet.

 

We’ve only had five hours of electricity a day for the past little while here in Tyre. Which means I only have five hours in which to satisfy my taskmasters at The Globe and Mail before I’m reduced to typing in the dark, staring warily at the fast-draining little battery icon in the corner of my computer screen.

 

It’s not that I don’t care, Diary, I’ve just been busy. But I did mean to tell you about our trip down here.

 

I left Beirut Monday morning along with Bruce Wallace, the Tokyo correspondent for the Los Angeles Times (he’s a Canuck, btw, he used to be a bigshot at Macleans magazine). We were a bit late getting going because we, or at least I, had been skeptical that the United Nations-brokered ceasefire was actually going to happen.

 

(Just fyi, I thought I had good reason for being a naysayer. I awoke at 6:18 a.m. that morning – 102 minutes before the ceasefire was supposed to begin – to the whistle of an Israeli naval shell that sounded, to my jolted-awake ears, like it had just cleared my hotel by a less-than-safe distance. We had gotten used to hearing bangs the past few weeks. They were okay, it meant the shell or missile had already landed. Whistles are far more unsettling.)

 

Anyway, we left the Commodore Hotel only at 10 a.m., two hours after the truce had taken hold. By then, we sensed it might be real. The problem is, a few hundred thousand refugees from south Lebanon who had taken refuge in the north had gone through the same maybe-maybe-okayletsgorightnow thought process.

 

Bruce and I jumped into a silver Mercedes, heading south in the company of our calm translator, Jamal, and our maniac driver, Ali Mahmoud. It was the beginning of a near nine-hour exodus.

 

Seeing the road was crammed with a slow-moving convoy of refugees with mattresses piled high on top of their cars, we decided to cut eastwards and upwards, taking a winding path through the Chouf Mountains rather than the straighter, clogged, main coastal highway. We were so clever that we deked out from behind a blue Volvo station wagon, spent the next two hours hurtling along the edge of cliffs with Ali Mahmoud apparently bent on making us the last casualties of the war, only to return to the main road at the port city of Sidon – right behind the same blue Volvo

 

At Sidon, we faced our next hurdle, a bridge that had been turned into a ski jump by an Israeli air strike. Staring at the long, unmoving, line of cars, and watching the Lebanese army’s slow progress at building something for people to drive across, we decided to leave Ali Mahmoud’s silver Mercedes to fate (he called his son to pick it up) and we walked down one side of the destroyed bridge and up the other, sweating from the weight of our bulletproof vests and luggage.

 

On the other side, we somehow secured a Maroon Oldsmobile 88 that looked sturdy despite the unblinking orange “Service Engine Soon” light on the dashboard. I asked Ali Mahmoud, who doesn’t read English, what he thought the light meant. He shrugged and accelerated around another batch of dawdling ex-refugees.

 

The south, like I said, is far from back to normal. Tyre is the best bit, since most of the bombs fell on the outskirts of the city, and only a few buildings in the centre have been destroyed.

 

Still, it’s hard to find things like food and fuel down here. I’ve been living on candlelight meals of Happy Cow cheese, pita bread and Pepsi since I arrived. Gas for the car is $50 (U.S.) for 20 litres.

 

But compared to those who live in the towns around Tyre, I have nothing to complain about. No picture or 1,000 words of mine can ever capture what these places look like. In towns that once weren’t much different from some places in Greece or Italy, there’s simply nothing left standing. Just piles of rubble where people’s homes and lives used to be.

 

I want to keep going, Diary, and to tell you about my day yesterday when I stood and watched – fighting hard not to cry or vomit – as Red Cross workers pulled 14 badly decomposed bodies from the rubble of a home in a place called Ainata. It was one of the most horrifying things I've ever witnessed.

 

I’m not sure I can, though. This time it’s me, not my computer, that lacks the energy.